HMS Victory in Portsmouth, England
For the past 9 days, I've been in England on a business trip with Winchester (South England) as a base. Fortunately, there were no meetings over the weekend and that allowed for a bit of touring. A group of colleagues rented a car and off we went. One of the most interesting stops was in Portsmouth, right on the English Channel. There is a fantastic Navel museum there with the pride and joy artifact being the HMS Victory.
The HMS Victory is an amazing sailing vessel with many navel victories under her belt. As I walked from deck to deck (there were about 7 of them), I was struck by how low the ceilings were; the deeper I descended, the more hunched over I had to be. About 800 sailors were aboard at any one time, and the thoughts of them moving about in the confined spaces makes one almost feel squished. With oceans wave action, cannons firing, commands being shouted, no doubt those seamen had one hell of a job. According to the tour guide, the cannons (over 100 of them) could be heard for over 50 miles when fired so I'm sure those on board had no hearing by the time they completed their duty. It is also worth sharing that it was aboard HMS Victory that Vice Admiral Nelson was shot and killed. Their are plaques aboard the boat marking the exact spot of each (he was shot while on top deck but he died on the lowest deck).
Seeing the massive scale of all the ships components and the rudimentary system sure does give a different perspective into todays modern boats. The HMS Victory is quite different than our little Ariel!
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Those old ships are so fascinating to tour. Do you think maybe people were smaller back in the day than they are now? Hmm, wonder if I'm related to Admiral Nelson.
ReplyDelete@jomamma: We wondered about the height of people too, and asked the tour guide. His response was that there was, in general, not much difference in the height of the people in the 1800s and that, in fact, one of the captains (whose name I can't recall at the moment) was 6 foot 4 inches! Within the ship, there was only 1 place that this captain could stand fully erect and that space was only a 2 foot by 2 foot area!
ReplyDeleteHubby says they didn't mind the tight quarters because the didn't have a lot of stuff like Tupperware!
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